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bore a willing testimony to his genius and his good judgment. A larger ship-of-war from that station joined the expedition, which, in January, 1699, caught a glimpse of the continent, and anchored before the Island St. Rose. On the opposite shore, the fort of Pensacola had just been established by three hundred Spaniards from Vera Cruz. This prior occupation is the reason why, afterwards, Pensacola remained a part of Florida, and the dividing line between that province and Louisiana was drawn between the Bays of Pensacola and Mobile. Obedient to his orders, and to the maxims of the mercantile system, the governor of Pensacola would allow no foreign vessel to enter the harbor, Sailing to the west, D'Iberville cast anchor south-southeast of the eastern point of Mobile, and, in February, landed on Massacre, or, as it was rather called, Dauphine, Island. The water between Ship and Horn Islands being found too shallow, the larger ship from the station of St. Domingo returned, and the frigates anchored near the groups of the Chandeleur, while D'Iberville with his people erected huts on Ship Island, and made the discovery of the River Pascagoula and the tribes of Biloxi. The next day, a party of Bayagoulas, from the Mississippi, passed by: they were warriors returning from an inroad into the land of the Indians of Mobile.

In two barges, D'Iberville and his brother Bienville, with a Franciscan, who had been a companion to La Salle, and with forty-eight men, set forth to seek the Mississippi. Floating trees, and the turbid aspect of the waters, guided to its mouth. On the second day in March, they entered the mighty river, and ascended to the village of the Bayagoulas a tribe which then

dwelt on its western bank, just below the River Iberville, worshipping, it was said, an opossum for their manitou, and preserving in their temple an undying fire. There they found a letter from Tonti to La Salle, written in 1684, and safely preserved by the wondering natives. The Oumas also were visited; and the party

probably saw the great bend at the mouth of the Red River. A parish and a bayou, that bear the name of Iberville, mark the route of his return, through the lakes which he named Maurepas and Pontchartrain, to the bay which he called St. Louis. Early in May, at the head of the Bay of Biloxi, on a sandy shore, under a burning sun, he erected the fort which, with its four bastions and twelve cannon, was to be the sign of French jurisdiction over the territory from near the Rio del Norte to the confines of Pensacola. While D'Iberville himself sailed for France, his two brothers, Sauvolle and Bienville, were left in command of the station, round which the few colonists were planted. Thus began the commonwealth of Mississippi. Prosperity was impossible; hope could not extend beyond a compromise with the Spaniards on its flank, and the Indian tribes around, - with the sands, which it was vain to till, and the burning sun, that may have made the emigrants sigh for the cool breezes of Hudson's Bay. Yet there were gleams of light the white men from Carolina, allies of the Chickasas, invaded the neighboring tribes of Indians, making it easy for the French to establish alliances. Missionaries, also, had already conciliated the good will of remoter nations; and from the Taensas and the Yazoos, Davion whose name belonged of old to the rock now called Fort Adams — and Montigny floated down the Mississippi to visit their countrymen. Already a line of communication existed between Quebec and the Gulf of Mexico. The boundless southern region-made a part of the French empire by lilies carved on forest-trees, or crosses erected on bluffs, and occupied by French missionaries and forest rangers was annexed to the command of the governor of Biloxi.

During the absence of D'Iberville, it became apparent that England was jealous of his enterprise. Already Hennepin had been taken into the pay of William III., and, in 1698, had published his new work, in which, to bar the French claim of discovery, he had, with impudent

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falsehood, claimed to have himself first descended the Mississippi, and had interpolated into his former narrative a journal of his pretended voyage down the river. This had been published in London while the fort at Biloxi was in progress; and, at once, an exploring expedition, under the auspices of Coxe, a proprietor of New Jsey, sought also for the mouths of the Mississippi. When Bienville, who passed the summer in exploring the forks below the site of New Orleans, in September, 1699, descended the river, he met an English ship of sixteen guns, commanded by Barr, one of two vessels which had been sent to sound the passes of the majestic stream. Giving heed to the assertion of Bienville of French supremacy, as proved by French establishments, the English captain turned back; and the bend in the river which was the scene of the interview was named, and is still called, English Turn. England was never destined to acquire more than a nominal possession of the Mississippi.

It was at this time that Bienville received the memorial of French Protestants to be allowed, under French sovereignty, and in the enjoyment of freedom of conscience, to plant the banks of the Mississippi. "The king," answered Pontchartrain at Paris, "has not driven Protestants from France to make a republic of them in America;" and D'Iberville returned from Europe with projects far unlike the peaceful pursuits of agriculture. First came the occupation of the Mississippi, in January, 1700, by a fortress built on a point elevated above the marshes, not far from the sea, soon to be abandoned. In February, Tonti came down from the Illinois; and, under his guidance, the brothers D'Iberville. and Bienville ascended the Great River, and made peace between the Oumas and the Bayagoulas. Among the Natchez, the Great Sun, followed by a large retinue of his people, welcomed the illustrious strangers. His country seemed

1

best suited to a settlement; and a bluff, now known as Natchez, was selected for a town, and, in honor of the countess of Pontchartrain, was called Rosalie.

While D'Iberville descended to his ships, soon to

embark for France, his brother, in March, explored Western Louisiana, and, crossing the Red River, approached New Mexico. No tidings of exhaustless wealth were gleaned from the natives; no mines of unparalleled productiveness were discovered among the troublesome morasses; and St. Denys, with a motley group of Canadians and Indians, was sent to ramble for six months in the far west, that he might certainly find the land of gold. In April, Le Sueur led a company, in quest of mineral stores, to mountains in our north-western territory. Passing beyond the Wisconsin, beyond the Chippewa, beyond the St. Croix, he sailed north till he reached the mouth of the St. Peter's, and did not pause till, entering that river, he came to the confluence of the Blue Earth. There, in a fort among lowas, he passed the winter, that he might take possession of a copper mine, and, on the return of spring, fill his boats with heaps of ore.

Le Sueur had not yet returned to Biloxi, when, in May, 1701, news came from the impatient ministry of impoverished France, that certainly there were gold mines on the Missouri. But bilious fevers sent death among the dreamers about veins of precious metals and rocks of emerald. Sauvolle was an early victim, leaving the chief command to the youthful Bienville; and great havoc was made among the colonists, who were dependent on the Indians for baskets of corn, and were saved from famine by the chase and the net and line. The Choctas and the Mobile Indians desired an alliance against the Chickasas, and the French were too weak to act, except as mediators. In December, D'Iberville, arriving with reënforcements, found but one hundred and fifty alive.

Early in 1702, the chief fortress of the French was transferred from Biloxi to the western bank of the Mobile River, the first settlement of Europeans in Alabama; and, during the same season, though Dauphine Island was very flat, and covered with sands which sustained no grasses, and hardly nourished a grove of pines, its excellent harbor was occupied as a convenient

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station for ships. Such was Louisiana in the days of its founder. Attacked by the yellow fever, D'Iberville escaped with his life, but his health was broken; and, though he gained strength to render service to France in 1706, the effort was followed by a severe illness, which terminated in his death at the Havana. In him the colonies and the French navy lost a hero worthy of their regret. But Louisiana, at his departure, in 1702, was little more than a wilderness claimed in behalf of the French king; in its whole borders, there were scarcely thirty families. The colonists were unwise in their objects, searching for pearls, for the wool of the buffalo, for productive mines. Their scanty number was scattered on discoveries, or among the Indians in quest of furs. There was no quiet agricultural industry. Of the lands that were occupied, the coast of Biloxi is as sandy as the deserts of Lybia; the soil on Dauphine Island is meagre on the delta of the Mississippi, where a fort had been built, Bienville and his few soldiers were insulated and unhappy, at the mercy of the rise of waters in the river; and the buzz and sting of mosquitoes, the hissing of the snakes, the croakings of the frogs, the cries of alligators, seemed to claim that the country should still, for a generation, be the inheritance of reptiles, while, at the fort of Mobile, the sighing of the pines, and the hopeless character of the barrens, warned the emigrants to seek homes farther within the land.

But, at least, the Spaniards at Pensacola were no longer hostile; Spain, as well as France, had fallen under the sovereignty of the Bourbons; and, after ineffectual treaties for a partition of the Spanish monarchy, all Europe was kindling into wars, to preserve the balance of power, or to refute the doctrine of legitimacy. This is the period when Spain became intimately involved in our destinies; and she long remained, like France, the enemy to our fathers as subjects of England-the friend to their independence.